1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to information retrieval systems and, more particularly, to systems and methods for performing point-of-view searching.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional techniques for searching, such as for searching a hypertext medium such as the World Wide Web (“web”), are replete with deficiencies. For example, current search engines permit only key word searching, possibly extended by features, such as restricting the answer set to a given domain or a given host.
One technique permits a user to specify one or a set of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) as “authoritative.” Similarly, another set can be specified as lacking in authority. This technique is based on finding hubs and authorities via the Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS) algorithm. The underlying information used for the computation is a co-citation index. The goal of the technique is to modify the co-citation index in such a way that the “authority” increases for positive examples and decreases for negative examples. Thus, the authority of other URLs can be changed.
There are two main problems with this approach. First, the co-citation index must be computed, which limits the size of the underlying link graph. For this and other reasons, the link graph is restricted to documents in the neighborhood of documents containing search query terms. For an arbitrary query, the likelihood that a “good” or “bad” example URL is in this small neighborhood is remote. Furthermore, the underlying HITS algorithm has numerous shortcomings (e.g., topic drift and spammability) which may affect the performance of this technique.
As a result, there exists a need for a mechanism that provides search results that are related to a defined set of information, such as URLs.